OAS changes will make it harder to enjoy life later

Nice to see Mr. Goodyear out there defending his government’s changes to Old Age Security in front of a group of seniors who are, of course, unaffected by the changes.

However, I fail to understand his comment that younger people “can now be assured that they too will have the same benefits that you have today”.

Clearly they will not, since they will have to wait two more years to receive benefits, and that assumes there are no further changes down the road. In my mind, a more equitable solution to the problem would have been to increase the clawbacks to OAS that take place at higher income brackets.

OAS was originally intended to provide an income supplement to those on modest or average incomes. Currently, the clawbacks only start at an individual income of approximately $70,000 and the OAS is not fully clawed back until this income reaches $110,000.

Since, for many retirees, there will be two incomes (and higher income earners know how best to split these), then you can earn a heck of a lot of money in retirement and still be receiving OAS payments from the government.

Gary also states that “many people do not want to quit work at 65”. I am not sure who he is speaking for, but the majority of us are quite keen to retire and do something else with these golden years.

I am sure there are some exceptions, I just don’t happen to know any of them. If you have to wait until age 67 to retire, this may not leave you many healthy years to travel or achieve other personal goals. Maybe Gary wants to keep on going, but then again, why would he, with his overly handsome pension provisions as an MP and minister?

Another government spokesman blithely stated that very few people work in physically demanding jobs these days.

Try telling that to the many people that spend years of their lives working night shifts or rotating shifts, the long distance trucker with failing eyesight or the many more of us that spend our working life peering at a computer screen and developing poor posture as we get older.

Furthermore, as someone that has spent most of his life in the human resources field, I know just how hard the job market can be on people that lose their jobs in their 50s. Exactly what sort of work are some of these people going to do until they reach this new retirement age?

And finally, back to those younger people. Don’t hold your breath that there won’t be further changes, even though Gary promises us they have “done the math”.

This same government can’t quite seem to put its finger on the cost of F-35 stealth fighter planes, since current estimates range from a low of $9 billion to well upwards of $25 billion.

Personally, I would have thought that most of that money could have been much better applied to areas such as health care, education or, yes, even pensions, where there would be a real benefit for Canadians.